Thursday, September 06, 2018

Fringe Q&As: Comedian Jo Caulfield on 15 years at the Fringe, the deadpan humour of Scottish people and the reality of porn...

Comedian Jo Caulfield is offering fans a veritable trio of treats this Fringe season as she's performing not one, not two, but THREE stand-up shows during the month of August.

Amidst all the prep and sojourns to Portobello Beach, Jo took time out to answer our Q&As.

What is your Fringe show about?

My favourite subject — ME.I use my shows to get things off my chest. If someone or something annoys me, it goes straight into my show. This year I’ve had far too many run-ins with bad tempered shop assistants, ridiculous service in uber-cool hip hotels, and several embarrassing experiences on holiday. I’ll be talking about relationships and how they change over time, and overhearing my husband giving his nephew advice for how to deal with women.

I also saw my first porn film this year - which was SO ludicrous and unrealistic I’ve written my own *real life* version which I’ll be reading out.I’m a stand-up comedian. I don’t go for themes. There’s no bells or whistles. It’s just me and a microphone. And to be honest, if there wasn’t an audience I would still be talking!

How many times/many years have you appeared at the Fringe?

This is my 15th year.That might seem excessive but I like the discipline of forcing myself to write a new show every 12 months. Some comedians can run with the same routines for several years (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that) but I enjoy the excitement of continually creating something fresh. Advice for new performers:Eat a large breakfast. You need the fuel. Chances are you’re going to miss a meal at some point during the day. Eat fruit. Eat bananas. Full of potassium. They release energy slowly. Apparently Gordon Strachan (Aberdeen, Man Utd, Leeds, Scotland) would eat one before every game and another at halftime.Don’t read reviews. The audience response tells you everything you need to know.Don’t read anyone else’s reviews. Don’t get into the trap of being jealous of someone else’s good review or secretly happy about someone else’s bad review. You are NOT in competition.

Don’t believe anyone’s publicity. If they were really that ‘amazing’, they wouldn’t be playing in a half-empty 20 seat room at 2.15 in the afternoon.Don’t ask other performers “how their show is going” — you don’t care. And they don’t care how your show is going.Deals are NEVER made in the Loft Bar at midnight. ‘Networking’ is for bankers and insurance salesmen.No-one is forcing you to do this. No-one is holding a gun to your head. Relax and remember how incredibly lucky you are to be doing something you actually want to do.

What’s your most memorable moment from the Fringe?

It was bitter sweet experience. It was my first year at the Fringe and I was excited seeing all my posters outside the venue. Until…I was walking by the Pleasance just after midnight and I saw a man looking at my poster. Or, at least I thought that was what he was doing. As I got closer I realised he was drunk and he was urinating on my face.

What’s the worst thing about the Fringe?

It’s over too quickly! I live in Edinburgh and September always feels like waking up with a hangover in a ghost town. The crowds are gone. The posters are all ripped and fading. The worst bit is seeing all the venues being dismantled and the trucks being loaded up.It’s like putting away the Christmas decorations and thinking “There’s a whole 365 days until we can do this again. I want it NOW!”

If you were not a performer what would you be doing?

I hate to think about this because I’m totally unskilled and don’t have any qualifications. I used to work in bars and clubs. And I had a couple of years as a waitress. But I was a real maverick waitress - I took orders from no-one.Is watching Netflix a possible career choice? I’m good at that.

How do you prepare for a performance?

Rest. Sleep for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Turn up to the venue at least one hour early and sit in the dressing room. I don’t like to talk to anyone or have a drink before the show. I’m just running the lines through my head and trying to get into a good mental frame.People think comedians are all sitting backstage, swapping jokes and laughing. Not at all. They do the complete opposite. They’re sitting quietly and focusing. There is NO Keith Richards-like behaviour backstage. This August I’ll definitely be conserving my energy because I’m doing three shows: my Stand-Up show (Killing Time), a satirical political play with Timothy Bentinck, from The Archers (Brexit) and recording another series of Stop The Press for BBC Radio Scotland.

Favourite thing about being in Edinburgh?

I love Edinburgh so much I moved here six years ago. Where do I start?? Walking down the Royal Mile at midnight - it’s like walking through a fairytale. The decaying urban beauty of Leith, the bars and restaurants down by The Shore, the mixture of people on Leith Walk, being able to get a bowl of homemade soup in every cafe, the deadpan humour of Scottish people where you’re not sure if they’re complimenting you or insulting you, the posh old ladies of Morningside with their Miss Jean Brodie ‘creme deal creme’ accents, and the vastly underrated Portobello Beach.

When younger comics ask me for advice about the Festival I always tell them: get away from the city centre for a couple of hours, every three or four days. Get a bus out to Portobello. There’s a beach and sand and dogs and normal people - reconnect with how unimportant the Fringe Festival actually is.Last year I was a guest on Celebrity Mastermind. I picked Edinburgh as my specialist subject. I got every question right. I got every general knowledge question wrong, but I got every question about Edinburgh right!Did you know the grass mounds on Leith Links were where the cannons were mounted to defend the port…?

Most city’s have a city centre for shopping and suburbs for living in, whereas Edinburgh was designed for people to actually live in the city. I love that. It gives it a modern cosmopolitain edge.

What’s the most Scottish thing you’ve ever done?

Ate haggis at a Burns Supper in Stirling Castle, before doing the Reply For The Lassies. It was an amazing evening! The haggis being piped in, the address of the haggis, Tam o’ Shanter being read out… I loved the way all that pomp and ceremony celebrating a great artist, quickly descended into a room full of men drinking whisky and arguing about football.

You never really expect a man in full Highland-dress to say “Ah’m telling you, if Rabbie Burns was alive today he’d be telling Alex Macleish he should drop that lanky bampot McBurnie and play Leigh Griffiths upfront” - but I did hear that at a Burns Supper.

Favourite Scottish food/drink?

Aberdeen morning rolls. Or as I call them: “heart attacks waiting to happen.” All that salt and fat. They go perfect with butter and bacon and a defibrillator.There’s a cafe on the Beach Boulevard in Aberdeen called The Inversnecky. It’s a great place to sit outside with a mug of tea, a hot morning roll, and watch the world go by. All the locals are sitting outside. They’re still wearing their coats, but they have their hoods down. I think it’s the Aberdeen version of “going Alfresco”. As for drink — I can (and do) drink anything. There’s so many great bars in Edinburgh. Especially down the bottom of Leith Walk. Full of old hardened drinkers. Their the kind of places where you can get an organic craft beer but there’s also a frisson of a ‘stabbing’ in the air.My favourite bar down Leith Walk has a darts board, a pool table and Sky Sports. It’s like a creche for men. They’re all perfectly happy, because they’ve got their toys around them. Last time I was in there with my friend Alison I asked the barman if they had anything for women. He panicked, looked around, and stuttered “Ah, we’ve got crisps…will that do?”

The Wee Review is Scotland’s online arts & culture magazine. They provide reviews and opinion on the performing arts across Scotland, as well as commentary on wider cultural issues, politics and society.

Jo Caulfield is a well-kent face at the Fringe. Even if you don’t know her comedy, you’ll know her from the rogue’s gallery of posters that decorate the city in August. Nowadays, she’s a local too, having moved here a few years back.

Tired comic meets grumpy local, then? Not a bit of it. Though you’d definitely forgive her some cynicism or jadedness toward the city’s annual summer shindig, Caulfield is someone still in love with the game in general, and “Edinburgh”, comedy’s very own World Cup, in particular.

“I do get excited about it, yes.”

That could be PR flannel… but probably isn’t. As we chat in one of Leith’s shoreside bars, Caulfield’s nothing if not candid. She’s generous about others, open about her own comedy craft, and expresses a solidarity for the scene that reveals her DIY roots living in a squat, playing in bands and running her own club. It’s there in the enthusiastic tone with which she describes her pre-Fringe build-up:

“I did one the other night in Ormskirk, a tiny little bar, sells out immediately because it’s only got 40 seats, perfect if I want to try out a longer story…”

“I do a really nice preview at a place that Jason Cook [comedian] runs in North Shields…”

She has it all mapped out. But this schlepping round the country is not idle routine, and it’s certainly not mere bill-paying (mainly because it often doesn’t). It’s part of a well-honed process to get Fringe-ready and to put something back into the circuit. “I need them to be there,” she says of the small promoters and the audiences they bring. And here’s why:

“There’s something about people staring at you that makes your brain edit. The words come out so much better than if I was sitting, trying to write it. I get the idea, and then I have to say it in front of people to write it.”

“It [The Fringe] absolutely forces you to write, because otherwise you’ll be on stage and you’ll go ‘I want to do my favourite material’. Well you can’t. You’ve got a show to write, so I have to do this new stuff and make thatmy favourite material to improve it.”

These days, Caulfield’s home at the Fringe is Edinburgh’s long-standing comedy HQ, The Stand. This year will mark ten years for her at the club.

“I’m very glad that I’ve found The Stand. I’d done other rooms and I couldn’t believe how little money I’d made. People say that’s not the way to look at it, but it’s my business!

Then I spoke to Tommy [Sheppard, Stand boss and now an MP]. He had this new room – the Police Club [Stand 3 for the Fringe], a perfect square room with a little bar in the corner, and because I’d already built an audience they were able to find me. I’ve been very happy there.”

Onto this year’s show then – Killing Time. Depending where you place the stress, it’s what you do when the wi-fi goes down on the train, or what a murderer says to himself before setting off for work. But for Caulfield, it’s more of a placeholder to cover her for every eventuality:

“I think of a title that sounds like me, like it has a bit of attitude to it, but vague, very vague, so that whatever I want to talk about can be in there. Some people go ‘well, it’s about when I went through my wardrobe and I thought all these clothes tell a story…’ Mine are never like that. Mine are always opinion and stand-up.”

“There’s always something goes through it so I can tie things up at the end. You do it and do it and then go ‘there seems to be a lot about this’ or ‘the attitude is this’ but it’s always just real life stuff. Anything that irritates me or makes me think ‘that’s a bit weird’.”

As is common practice for many performers, she’s pulling a double shift at the Fringe. At lunchtimes, she’s performing in Brexit, a new satire up at the Pleasance, before heading down to The Stand for her evening solo gig. Back in 2012 when a different political hoo-hah was on satirists’ minds, Caulfield starred in Coalition, by the same writing team. In Brexit, she shares the stage with Timothy Bentick (better known as David Archer), Hal Cruttenden, Pippa Evans and Mike McShane. What made her turn thesp again?

“I’m often asked to do plays, but they go ‘will you do three weeks rehearsal?’ No!”

“I’m doing this one because it’s a funny script, with a character who’s very similar to me. I’m the EU negotiator, saying to Britain ‘you can’t have that’ so I get a lot of sarky lines. I do two days, and then do two run-throughs in front of an audience in London and then come up here. Otherwise, I don’t know what on earth actors do all day!”

No shonky Eurotrash accent though. “There’s a whole backstory whereby I’ve been educated at an international school so it doesn’t matter that I’m not foreign.”

The problem with planning ahead for topical comedy at the Fringe, apart from there being lots of other shows with the same idea, is “events, dear boy!” There’ll be some shifty shenanigans going on in the corridors of Brussels and Westminster as we speak, so are they prepared for an emergency rewrite?

“One of the guys who’s written it was a Labour councillor and has worked in politics all his life. He’s a lawyer as well, so he knows very well what could be the possible outcomes. One of the scenarios of the play is what may happen. And that’s all I can say…”

The Fringe is known for its chaos and its burnouts, its illnesses and its hangovers, and doing two shows obviously multiplies those dangers. Experience can mitigate it, and domestic comfort can help too, so has the Fringe changed for Caulfield now she lives here?

“Well, it doesn’t hurt to be at home. Normally, you’re living in someone else’s flat, not doing the normal things you’d do. Basically you’re living like a pig. But this is where I live, so I still have to do the housework, wash the dishes and look after it. I can’t wreck it and leave in a month.”

“Going across the Royal Mile, that’s when I become a local, complaining about people and annoyed. And then I think, ‘but they’ve come to the festival, Jo, and you’re doing a show!'”

Has years of experience and the domestic routine taken the nervous edge off things? Does she casually rock up to the day job after a spot of housework or is she still operating on adrenaline?

“Oh no, still adrenaline. Every audience is different.”

“Sometimes the audience becomes like an organic matter, they all catch on to each other somehow. Other nights, they just want to have a good time and it’s not that much to do with me. Sometimes I think ‘it’s not that funny!'”

“I don’t do a preview. I used to, but now I feel the preview night feels like a rehearsal and I don’t want to rehearse stand-up, I want to perform. The first night, you’re full of adrenaline and that makes the show good. Even the bits you’re still working out. Rather than going ‘I’ve got this night to work it out,’ it has to work tonight.”

As someone who’s been there, done that, you might expect Caulfield to have some sage words about the state of the scene. You wouldn’t be disappointed. The Free Fringe has been one of the big developments during Caulfield’s Fringe career – “a breath of fresh air”, as she calls it – and her take on it brings out the DIY spirit again. It should be affordable for performers AND audiences.

“I don’t like comedians doing the bucket speech thing. ‘If you go uptown you’ll be paying £15 or £20’… Well, not a lot of shows are £15 or £20. Also, this isn’t uptown. You’re not as good as that person. This environment isn’t as nice. You’ve all suddenly decided that it’s OK for you to demand not just whatever people want to give, but a minimum of £5. £5 is a maximum in that environment! That’s not the spirit of it. Now you’ve made people think they need to give £5 or £10, they might go to less shows. Comics should be careful. They could ruin it for themselves.”

She’s no less forthright about some performers’ motivations for being in Edinburgh.

“You have to come because you want to do a show. There’s a lot of people going, ‘Right, I’m throwing everything at it! This is my year!’ and then they’re the people who have breakdowns.”

“Some people don’t really want to be stand-ups, they want to be something else that you can get from being a stand-up, whereas I really, really like stand-up. I like the autonomy of it, and being self-employed and not reliant on somebody liking me, somebody on TV. I can get on and do my own thing. I don’t want to do just anything on telly, and I think some people would. Maybe I’m too punk rock in my attitude. I thought the deal was – you can do what you want. You don’t have to be somebody’s performing monkey.”

A modern part of that careerist cycle, the scramble to be the performing monkey, are the quick win gags that get column inches, build a bit of profile, and hopefully, lead to a panel show spot. It’s no surprise when she says that Dave’s Joke of the Fringe is “one of the most annoying things”.

“They’re always either nicked jokes or not very good jokes. A lot of them are Gary Delaney jokes that somebody else is doing. It’s agents or PR people sending in a joke. You’re not going round every show to see which is the best. You don’t know enough about comedy to know that’s an old joke, or that’s somebody else’s joke or that’s not even a very good joke. It’s so… reductive.”

“But, it’s a ‘comedians’ thing. I was so annoyed by the Dave list, I had a device where I read out some one-liners in my show. The audience didn’t really understand. They’re going, ‘well, she seems really annoyed by this Dave thing. We don’t know what it is, but she’s a comedian, so surely she’d like a joke competition?’ It was one of those things that was too much a comedians thing.”

Does she see herself beyond these lists and awards and star ratings and the whole malarkey these days? A loyal following and a certain level of profile must inure a comedian to it in some ways?

She thinks…

“Not… beyond. I think it’s not healthy. I don’t think it’s mentally healthy to let that into your head. I know I do good shows and I know that people come and that’s what it’s about. All that stuff… I feel who are you to judge me?”

“When I used to be in a band, the music press – NME and Sounds and Mojo as it was then – really, really knew about music. They were so passionate about it, their knowledge was immense. They might not always be right, but at least I respected their knowledge. Then stand-up came along, and a lot of these reviewers don’t know much about comedy. A lot of them I have absolutely no respect for at all.”

“At the same time, it’s part of the business. People go ‘I never read them, I never look,’ but then you see the stars on their poster, so somebody did! You can’t say you’re completely out of the loop unless you’re Daniel Kitson. ‘There’s my flyer, it’s all black, I’m not telling you where I’m performing.’ But he knows his people will find him so he can do that.”

But lest anyone think Caulfield herself has any envy of others’ fame or profile, she’s remarkably magnanimous towards everyone she mentions. Even some that might raise an eyebrow…

“You get horrible attacks about Michael McIntyre. But you can’t say he’s not brilliant, he is. You watch him on stage. He’s just joy on stage. And he worked really hard.”

“It all became second hand, like hack backlash. ‘I’ve heard what he’s like.’ But you haven’t even seen his act!”

There’s mixed feelings about McIntyre on our team. We’ve just given him five stars for his Big World Tour, though some of us from that part of the world have unrepeatable things to say about his Yorkshire routine. Caulfield makes a good case in his defence:

“Women don’t remember routines. Women don’t sit around and do the words to Withnail & I. It’s very blokey. But I was on a bus in London and I heard these women doing his routine. The jeans one. I thought, wow! Because he’s camp and funny and very observational, he’s totally tapped into that female market. They love it so much, they’re doing it to each other, like I remember doing French & Saunders at school. Those people weren’t being played to and now they are.”

Caulfield’s obviously a lifer, a comic who will be touring clubs as long as she’s got an audience. Hearing her talk about stand-up, you can sense her love for it and the graft that keeps her at the top of her game.

“The thing about stand-up is you have to be doing it to be good. You can’t take your foot off the pedal. It has to keep evolving. Stand up will move away from you. You see that with people who’ve taken long breaks. They went off and did a sitcom and then they come back. They’re rusty and they don’t realise it’s changed.”

“Stand-up now is very in the moment, and the audience expect to believe you. Doesn’t mean it has to be true, but they want to believe it is. You have to be very present. I see some comics of my generation and I think ‘you’re not present’. This sounds like ‘material’. You can’t be like that any more. You can’t just dish it out in your suit.”

“Audiences get an instinct about people that makes them go with them and believe them and feel they know you.”

It’s that instinct that makes audiences go with Jo Caulfield, and why, when The Stand opens its doors again this year, they’ll be back again for more. As one audience member said of last year's show, “finally, we’ve seen something funny!”

Me: As a Fringe regular, what’s your favourite thing about performing at the festival?

Jo: Not travelling! I live in Leith so I can walk to the venue and walk home. Sleeping in my own bed. Catching up with comedian friends I haven’t seen for years. It’s the strange thing about the UK comedy circuit, you can be on the same bill with one comedian every week for a couple of months and bond with them, then not see them again for several years. The mix of the audience. All ages all races, all different walks of life, all coming together for comedy. It’s like you know the tune you’re going to play but you don’t know what instruments you’re going to have till the show starts. That is a great analogy until you know that the only instrument I can play is the drums…..and not even very well. I love that I can do a new hour every year and that people will come back again and again. There is no bigger compliment for a comic than people saying “See you next year” on the way out.

Me: Who else are you looking forward to seeing perform live at the festival?

Jo: Along with my stand-up show at 7.40pm, I’m doing a play every lunchtime (‘Brexit’ – a political satire), so there’ll be very little time to catch many other shows. When I do get a spare couple of hours, I like to take a chance on something different, pick someone I don’t know and just be open to a new experience. This has lead to me seeing some terrible shows, it’s not a reliable method, but I have also been pleasantly surprised. On my day-off I will definitely go and see Eleanor Tiernan (1.40pm, Banshee Labyrinth) and Joke Thieves (8.30pm, Cabaret Voltaire). It’s a bit of a busman’s holiday for a comedian to watch other comedians but these two shows always make me laugh loud and hard.

Me: We both grew up in Leicestershire before escaping. What are your fondest memories of growing up in the county and leaving it?

Jo: I ended up in Leicestershire or more correctly Rutland. I usually say Leicestershire as most people don’t think Rutland is a real place. I grew up in the Air Force, well not me, my Dad was in the Air Force; that means you move every two years. My most formative years, 14-17, were spent in a village near Oakham. Yes, read that sentence again and feel the teenage despair. The nearest big town was barely a small town. Luckily I had a mate with a van, this meant we could get to Nottingham and Leicester for gigs. I remember we went in the van to see the B52’s, I hadn’t asked where they were playing. I was 15 and still at school. We were half way there when I realised we were driving to London. They were on at the Hammersmith Palais. I can’t stress the importance of having a friend with transport… well, one friend had a van and one had something uninsurable that was always breaking down. This opened up a whole world of music gigs, parties and cider drinking. An old friend recently sent me some photos of that time. She put “Jo as usual in an outfit she has made herself that is falling apart”. I used to buy all my clothes from charity shops and hand sew things, very Molly Ringwald; but my outfits would start to unravel and fall apart as the night went on.

Me: What was the best thing about being a television warm-up and if you could have anyone, living or dead, warm up for you, who would you choose and why?

Jo: TV warm-up is a strange thing. The audience aren’t there to see you. You’re servicing the show. You can be halfway through a joke, just about to hit the punchline, when the producer cuts you off coz the scene is ready. You have to keep everything short and sharp and punchy. The best thing was doing the warm-up on The Graham Norton Show. I ended up getting asked to join Graham’s writing team. Five series later I was still there. It was an amazing job: the show went to New York and LA. I racked up a mountain of air-miles! Oh – that and the sandwiches in the Green Room. They’re always good. If I had a warm-up I’d pick Jack Dee….for no other reason than he makes me laugh.

Me: Your extensive CV appears to cover all aspects of working in comedy I can possibly think of but are there any comedy ambitions you are yet to fulfil?

Jo: Simple = To get better. You’re never fully-formed as a comedian. There’s no end result in comedy. So my ambition is to keep being funny. I’ve done all sorts of different things on radio and TV, and I’m always open to any work that I think is worth doing, but I’m quite choosy about what I accept. I couldn’t imagine not being a Stand Up. It’s me talking about me, and that’s my favourite subject. I was on Celebrity Mastermind last year and I suggested ‘Jo Caulfield’ as my specialist subject. The producer laughed. To this day I still have no idea why he found that funny.

Me: What’s coming up for you next after the Fringe?

JO: No rest for the wicked! I’m straight into recording another series of ‘Stop The Press” for BBC Radio Scotland in early September. After that I’m hoping for a couple of weeks of lying down and not talking. Last year I ended up in Hamburg, then Lisbon. (I highly recommend both if you haven’t been)… then it’s Christmas, then it’s New Year, then I start putting down notes for Edinburgh Fringe 2019!!

Jo Caulfield will be performing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe in Killing Time from 3 to 26 August at The Stand Comedy Club 3 & 4 and in Brexit from 1 to 26 in the Pleasance Courtyard.

About Me

Jo Caulfield is one of the most successful and instantly recognisable comedians in the UK.
Jo has been nominated as "Funniest Woman" (LAFTA Awards), "Best Female Stand-Up" (Chortle Awards) and one of "The 100 Greatest Stand-Ups" (Channel4).
The Guardian calls her “Scathing, bitchy and intelligent with masses of attitude", while The Observer advocates "Jo Caulfield is an inspiration to all would-be female comedians".
A regular guest on "Mock The Week", “Have I Got News For You” and “Never Mind The Buzzcocks”, Jo is also the star of her own critically acclaimed Radio 4 comedy show “It’s That Jo Caulfield Again”.
“Many of the points Jo Caulfield makes about the human condition would have sociologists stroking their beards in admiration, but her audiences tend to be laughing too much to notice” – The Times.
“Pick of the day. Scathing, bitchy and sharp-witted comedy” – Radio Times.